JPMorgan Chase accused the U.S. Virgin Islands on Tuesday of exaggerating CEO Jamie Dimon’s role in the decision on whether to keep disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as a client after Epstein was convicted of a sex-related charge in 2008.
“Dimon is not relevant to this action,” lawyers for the bank said in a court filing Tuesday, calling the USVI’s request a “fishing expedition” meant to draw media attention to “specious and unnecessary arguments,” Bloomberg and Reuters reported.
Lawyers for the bank said they did not believe Dimon was an “appropriate deponent,” according to the Financial Times. But they did agree to find a date this month for a deposition of Mary Erdoes, JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management chief. They also agreed to find a date to interview Mary Casey, another private banker at JPMorgan during Epstein’s tenure as a client.
Epstein was a client of JPMorgan from 1998 to 2013, and the bank, for its part, has turned over documents through 2014. But the USVI last week said it wants documents through August 2019, the month Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial.
JPMorgan on Tuesday said the request “would increase the number of documents captured” by search terms “from at least 364,000 to at least 694,000,” according to the Financial Times.
The effort would may have a limited return, the lawyers said. The USVI’s description of alleged post-2013 conduct was redacted from last week’s filing, but JPMorgan said Tuesday it consisted of a single 2015 email between a bank employee and Epstein about a possible line of credit for a third party who was already a bank customer, Bloomberg reported.
JPMorgan’s lawyers Tuesday noted the "massive trove" of information the USVI collected during previous litigation against Epstein's estate.
"If there were evidence supporting discovery from JPMC from 2014-2019, USVI would have found it,” the bank’s lawyers said.
JPMorgan’s lawyers pointed to an internal exchange that appeared to characterize whether to keep Epstein as a client as a decision that involved then-CEO of asset management, Jes Staley and the bank’s then-general counsel, Stephen Cutler but not necessarily Dimon, according to the Financial Times.
As for Dimon’s role, JPMorgan’s lawyers said Tuesday the USVI misrepresented one document as supposedly showing that Epstein arranged a meeting between Dimon and a foreign official. However, Staley turned down that request — a detail JPMorgan’s lawyers said USVI omitted, according to Bloomberg.
The bank said the USVI also misidentified Dimon in a document that referred to former private bank CEO John Duffy, the wire service reported.
